Now, with the financial and military dominance of the West coming to an end, not to mention global economic growth in general, all previously democratic nations have started to behave like their authoritarian counterparts. No wonder: they’re running a race against the clock to install as many surveillance cameras, software backdoors and data centers as possible to store and analyze all citizen’s personal data before the AI-bubble pops and the financial system breaks down… Causing the last remains of the social contract to go up in smoke. With this mass surveillance, combined with a rapid development of autonomous weapon systems, robots and drone swarms capable to outrun (and soon outsmart) any human, the possibility of stifling a revolution even before its idea is born has now become a technical reality. Not just in China, but in every wealthy nation worldwide.
balazs matics: “The Honest sorcerEr”
One of my favourite bloggers, Hungarian Balazs Matics – who writes on Substack as “B” under the banner The Honest Sorcerer – recently produced the above quote in one of his posts. It struck me strongly, since it expressed a number of ideas that have been troubling me in recent times. The push to authoritarianism and the suppression of dissent are real, obvious and deeply disturbing. The AI bubble has inflated to a desperately dangerous extent and it seems likely that if/when it bursts, the result may be near-catastrophic for the global economy. But just because the speculative bubble bursts and the vast ocean of money that pumped it up is lost doesn’t mean the capabilities it has created will disappear. On the contrary, the globe-spanning surveillance and analysis infrastructure will remain, making possible a level of social control that few of us have yet imagined.
The bursting AI bubble may well usher in a new Great Depression. Consider the “Global Financial Crisis” of 2008 and then consider how much bigger this latest mad bubble has already become. Consider also the fragility of many national and regional economies in the face of the blossoming, multi-front global war for energy and resource dominance in which we find ourselves. I would not be amazed if a major economic crisis, triggered by the AI bubble popping, led to a huge financial reset. Remember, most Western governments have declared that the next big economic crisis will not be bailed out. Instead they have passed laws (Australia too) enabling “bail-ins” – where the lost savings of ordinary people can be converted into shares or deferred entitlements. I can imagine a scenario where a financial crisis brings about the final disappearance of cash and all “money” goes online, enabling overtly negative interest rates, the “de-banking” of dissidents and many other evils.
Hard economic times favour fascist-style authoritarian politics, as we are seeing. This tendency is being encouraged and amplified by the corporations at the heart of the rising new system of surveillance capitalism. These corporations – all of them thoroughly bad, in my opinion – are joined at the hip to the governments that are facilitating their rise. Those governments are clearly hoping to further harness the tools of repression and social control the corporations are making possible. Even those of us who are familiar with the dark arts of propaganda and information warfare are floundering in the new algorithmic environment. The zone is flooded with lies and half-truths and the opposition is controlled. The tech corporations love the fascist-authoritarians because they know they stand to profit most from them. That may be one reason why Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is paying foreigners to swamp Australians’ feeds with pro-Pauline Hanson AI slop.
The tech corporations and AI companies are unabashedly collaborating with governments and armament makers to create and perfect autonomous weapons systems. These systems will be able to use data collected by surveillance capitalists to identify, track and monitor political dissidents in real time. When authorised, autonomous weapons systems will be able to target and destroy dissidents – most likely labelled “terrorists” – without the need for further human oversight. We have already seen early iterations of these systems at work in the Gaza genocide, where AI algorithms calculated the likelihood that individuals might be linked to alleged terrorist activity, then identified them for remote control murder.
There are many nasty organisations driving the technological, financial and political convergence necessary to bring about the chaotic dystopia envisaged by Matics. Oracle, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple: the usual suspects. But perhaps the ugliest of all these horrors is Palantir, the fiendish demon-spawn of a man named Peter Thiel, who has spent years piecing together a vast empire of data, acquired with the connivance of pliant politicians and businesses in all corners of the world. Thiel may also be fairly said to own and operate US Vice President J. D. Vance. It will be no surprise to me if Vance becomes president and if that happens then we may fairly say that Thiel has become president.
It will also not surprise me if Donald Trump declares that some emergency – military, economic or both – means elections must be “delayed”. This piece by celebrated left-wing writer Chris Hedges spells out how that might happen. (See key quote below.)
Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.” Thiel is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”
Chris hedges
Now, people have always made alarming predictions. Often they have not come true (though many have). But the clear and undeniable trends these days can’t be ignored. The sheer concentration of wealth and power and the unprecedented possibilities for the control of information and for the surveillance of individuals and communities point to the likelihood of extremely dangerous times ahead.
I wrote “dangerous times ahead”, which is of course very disrespectful to the millions of people for whom life is already extremely dangerous and difficult. It may be unpleasant for well-fed citizens in the West (like me) to contemplate the prospect of our governments moving further and further towards fascism, but there are many people who are in situations already far more dire than that. All these wars, which are arguably just one war, possibly the last great world war being fought, as usual, over energy and resources.
Journalist Richard Medhurst may have hit the nail on the head with this extraordinary summary, in which he pulls together many threads from current events and speculates on a possible grand strategy behind it all. Not surprising that Medhurst has been arrested and persecuted by the UK and Austrian governments. He has, after all, championed the Palestinian cause and also previously supported Australian journalist Julian Assange during his long imprisonment and persecution. I was worried about him, since he has posted nothing since the bombshell video linked above, but I did find this article that suggests he’s alive, free and active on another project. It’s natural to worry, since most Western governments now have laws that permit the arrest and detention of people with opinions that don’t align with the drivel snorted out of by the mainstream media. And often, the same laws can make it illegal to report on such arrests.
On a related topic, I was impressed beyond description by this incredibly brave speech by Australian author Richard Flanagan at this year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. In recent times I’ve been underwhelmed by many of the allegedly dangerous ideas floated at these festivals. So to hear Flanagan assemble this superb critique of the transnational anti-free-speech campaign being orchestrated by defenders and facilitators of the Gaza genocide – a campaign succeeding with the connivance of spineless governments and compromised, complicit media – was exhilarating. It is the best critique of its type I have read and I cannot recommend it too highly. Watch it before it disappears. Given what has happened to so many other people who have dared to speak honestly about the cruel excesses of Israel’s extremist government and military, I can’t help wondering what behind-the-scenes skulduggery Flanagan might face in the months to come.
Why would the Israeli state—which claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East—be party to such serial murder of the innocent? And the answer is very simple: it has to kill every journalist, it has to silence every voice that seeks to bear witness to truth, so that it can keep its own citizens and the world ignorant of the orgy of evil it has visited on the Palestinian people over the last three years in Gaza, and now in the West Bank and in Lebanon. In those countries where a bullet can’t be used, the deadliest slur to throw is that of antisemitism. And Israel is now seeking to silence us here in Australia with just that slur.
Richard Flanagan
On that topic, Israel and “antisemitism”, I can’t help but refer you to bold Aussie blogger Caitlin Johnstone, whose remarks in this piece highlight the mind-bending hypocrisy of senior Israeli government figures. Netanyahu and Ben Gvir are openly and shamelessly spouting stuff that would have anybody else pilloried for “blood libel” or worse.
I will share one last quote from another recent article that impressed me greatly, a piece by Greens Senator David Shoebridge on the Deepcut News website. Again, its a fine piece that pulls together a number of disparate threads and concludes with a rallying cry against Australia’s cynical one per cent.
Ninety nine per cent of us share a fundamental common interest. The other 1 per cent know this – they fear we will discover it and mobilise around it. So they’re shamelessly and effectively wielding their wealth to make us fight each other instead of them. The 1 per cent own a quarter of the entire wealth in Australia. In hard numbers, 20 people hold the same amount of wealth as 3 million other Australians combined. This handful of ultra-wealthy individuals has accumulated such concentrated power they are distorting our politics and economy to their own ends. They hand private planes to politicians like beers at a barbecue. They meet the prime minister at exclusive, lavish fundraisers, hand over a million dollar donation and then make it back in the next day’s trading. This is the political struggle of the moment: galvanising the 99 per cent into a people-powered political movement to resist and take back power from the 1 per cent.
David Shoebridge
